MEG: Nightstalkers (2 page)
Read MEG: Nightstalkers Online
Authors: Steve Alten
DT:
The second is to go numb while you talk about shit with professional sorrow sharers like yourself, as if anything said in this room’s going to change a thing.
TS:
I see. And the third option?
(00:25 sec elapsed time)
TS:
David, where are you going?
DT:
This’ll be our last session. Me and Monty, we’re going away for a while. Call it a business trip.
TS:
Do you think that’s a good idea? You’ve only been out of the hospital three weeks.
DT:
Yeah, well, it beats the other two options. See you in my dreams.
(End Session 3)
* * *
Jonas Taylor handed the transcript of his son’s last therapy session to his wife, Terry. “He’s not going after Bela and Lizzy. He’s going after the
Liopleurodon
.”
Strait of Juan de Fuca, Salish Sea
British Columbia, Canada
The Salish Sea (pronounced SAY-lish) is an intricate network of waterways located between the northwestern tip of the United States and the southwestern tip of the Canadian province of British Columbia. The entrance into the Salish Sea from the Pacific is the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a hundred-mile-long deepwater channel named after the pilot of a Spanish ship who, in 1592, bragged to his fellow mariners that he had located a passage which connected the port cities of Seattle and Vancouver to the open ocean.
The Salish Sea is nourished by the Pacific Ocean’s submarine canyons which stretch out like knotty fingers, channeling dense, cold, nutrient-rich seawater toward land. The deep waters off the southern coastline of Vancouver Island are home to chinook and salmon, rockfish, lingcod, and the giant halibut—the major carnivore fish of the Pacific Northwest. Thirty species of marine mammals inhabit the Salish Sea and its barrier islands, including sea otters, sea lions, and harbor and elephant seals—a favorite delicacy of the great white shark. Humpback whales forage the strait for plankton funneled in through the tides. Gray whales follow an annual migration pattern that routes them south from the Bering Sea past Vancouver Island on their way to the Baja Peninsula.
Situated atop the Salish Sea’s food chain are the region’s killer whales. Several hundred transients pass through these waters each summer, gorging on salmon. Resident orca pods patrol the straits like lions roaming the Serengeti, their black dorsal fins rolling the surface with each
chuff
of breath, the mammals shadowed by tourists in whale-watching boats and thrill-seekers in kayaks.
Now, another apex predator has made this waterway its home—two female siblings born into captivity to a parent whose sheer size and brutality had forged the sisters’ bond of survival.
Carcharodon megalodon:
the most ferocious species ever to inhabit the planet. For most of the last thirty million years these giant prehistoric great white sharks had ruled the oceans. Adult females reached sixty to seventy feet and fifty tons, their male counterparts a more subservient forty to fifty feet. But size was only one component that made these monsters the menace of the Miocene era. The creatures possessed an upper jaw that unhinged when hyperextended, yielding a bite radius that could engulf a small elephant while delivering a force of forty thousand pounds. Its triangular teeth were lethal; serrated along the edges and as large as a man’s hand. The lower teeth were more pointed and used for gripping their prey while the wider uppers were used to saw through flesh and bone. As hard as diamond, the ivory cutlery was backed by replacement teeth set in rows beneath the gum line.
Megalodon was far quicker than the cetaceans it hunted; its powerful caudal fin able to accelerate its torpedo-shaped body at bursts of thirty knots. The sharks’ enormous girth also functioned as an internal heat factory, its moving muscles channeling gobs of hot blood into its extremities through a process known as gigantothermy, enabling it to adapt to even the coldest Arctic temperatures.
As if size, speed, and the deadliest bite ever to evolve weren’t enough, Nature had endowed its ultimate killing machine with senses that gave it the ability to see, hear, feel, smell, and taste its prey for miles in every direction.
And yet for all its advantages, the creature had vanished from the paleo record approximately 1.8 million to 100,000 years ago—roughly about the time primitive man had learned how to use fire. Perhaps God or nature or evolution had not wanted these two dominant species to mix. Perhaps that is why those Megalodon that managed to survive the last ice age did so in the oceans’ deepest abyss.
Seventy percent of our planet is covered by water. Modern man has only explored five percent of the oceans and less than one percent of its extreme depths. We know more about distant galaxies than the abyssopelagic and hadalpelagic zones—habitats whose depths exceed 13,000 feet.
The deepest location on our planet is the Mariana Trench. Located in the Western Pacific near Guam, the gorge plunges 36,201 feet—nearly seven miles. The 1,550-mile-long, forty-mile-wide canyon was forged by the seismic activity generated by the Philippine Sea Plate subducting beneath its behemoth neighbors. And yet as unlikely as it seems, this isolated abyss became home to a prehistoric food chain—thanks to the very process which had created its extreme depths.
As cold water seeped into cracks along the Philippine plate’s fracturing ocean floor, it was heated by molten rock in the Earth’s mantle. Exposed to oxygen, magnesium, potassium, and other minerals, this superheated elixir was forcibly ejected back into the trench by way of hydrothermal vents. Once this hot mineral soup met the cold depths of the Western Pacific it generated hydrogen sulfide, which in turn fueled bacteria—the foundation of an abyssal chemosynthetic food chain. Tube worms fed off the bacteria, small fish off the tube worms, and bigger fish off the smaller fish. But it was the formation of a hydrothermal plume—a ceiling of soot coagulating a mile above the vent fields—that formed a warm water oasis, which attracted history’s most dominant predator.
During the Pleistocene epoch, cooling seas decimated many whale species—the staple of the Megalodon diet. As its food supply diminished, hungry adults turned to cannibalism. This allowed pods of orca access into shallow Megalodon nurseries and the rein of history’s apex predator was over.
It was the Megalodon nurseries located along the coastline of the Mariana island chain that preserved the species. Hunted by orca, the juvenile sharks went deep, discovering a warm water abyss that was stocked with food—albeit nothing as high in bio mass and fat content as whales.
Survival depends upon adaptation. Megalodon survived in the Mariana Trench by consuming squid instead of whales. The drop in fat content and protein lowered the sharks’ metabolisms, affecting their ability to hunt. Further adaption came with the loss of their dorsal pigment, their albino hides better suited for attracting both prey and mates. Spawning was limited by the availability of food; when food was scarce they turned on their own.
For several hundred thousand years the species remained trapped in its warm water purgatory … until modern man showed up and everything changed.
* * *
Jonas Taylor wasn’t looking for giant prehistoric sharks when he entered the trench’s
Challenger Deep
; the navy’s best deep-sea submersible pilot was escorting two scientists on a top-secret dive to vacuum manganese nodules off the trench floor.
It was on their third descent in eight days that disaster struck.
An excerpt from the recently released Defense Department files—courtesy of Eric Snowden—includes Jonas Taylor’s testimony, where he describes
Homo Sapien’s
first documented encounter with
Carcharodon megalodon
:
“The Sea Cliff was hovering about ten meters above the hydrothermal plume. Dr. Prestis was working the drone’s vacuum and the soothing vibrations of the motor were putting me to sleep. I must’ve drifted off because the next thing I knew the sonar was beeping—an immense object rising directly beneath us. Suddenly a ghost-white shark with a head bigger than our three-man sub emerged from the mineral ceiling, its gullet filling my keel portal.”
Taylor’s first instinct was to jettison the sub’s weight plates into the creature’s mouth while executing an emergency ascent—a maneuver not recommended below 10,000 feet. The sub’s pressurization system faltered, turning head wounds into fatal hemorrhages.
The two scientists died and Taylor was blamed. The physician-on-duty ordered a ninety day evaluation in a mental ward, after which the commander received a dishonorable discharge—a parting gift from his commanding officer, who intended to deflect his own culpability for ordering the exhausted pilot to make the dive.
His career over, Jonas set out to prove the albino monster he had encountered was not an aberration of the deep. Five years later he graduated from the Scripps Institute with a doctorate degree in paleobiology. A year later he published a book which theorized how ancient sea creatures living in isolated extremes could evolve in order to survive extinction.
Colleagues panned his work.
While Jonas struggled in the world of academia, world renowned cetacean biologist Masao Tanaka was completing construction of a new aquatic facility on the coast of Monterey, California. The Tanaka Oceanographic Institute was essentially a man-made lagoon with an ocean-access which intersected one of the largest annual whale migrations on the planet. Designed as a field laboratory, the waterway was intended to be a place where pregnant gray whales returning from their feeding grounds in the Bering Sea could birth their calves. Masao was so convinced his facility would bridge the gap between science and entertainment that he mortgaged his entire family fortune on the endeavor.
Rising construction costs forced Masao to accept a contract with the Japanese Marine Science Technology Center. The mission: to anchor sensory drones along the sea floor of the Mariana Trench, creating an early-warning earthquake detection system. To complete the array, D.J. Tanaka, Masao’s son, had to escort each drone to the bottom using an
Abyss Glider
, a torpedo-shaped one-man submersible.
When several of the drones stopped transmitting data, Masao needed a second diver to help D.J. retrieve one of the damaged aquabots in order to diagnose the problem.
He sent his daughter, Terry, to recruit Jonas Taylor.
Jonas accepted the offer, desiring only to recover an unfossilized white Megalodon tooth photographed in the wreckage—the evidence he needed to prove the sharks still existed.
The dive ended badly; Jonas and D.J. coming face to face with not one, but two Megs. The first was a forty-five foot male, which became entangled in the surface ship’s cable; the second was its sixty foot pregnant mate, which was lured out of the trench into surface waters teeming with food.
The Tanaka Institute took on the task of capturing the female. Jonas and Masao were determined to quarantine the monster inside the whale lagoon, with JAMSTEC agreeing to refit the canal entrance with King Kong-sized steel doors.
The hunt lasted a month, culminating in an act that would haunt Jonas’s dreams over the next thirty years. All was not lost—the Megalodon’s surviving pup was captured and raised in Masao’s cetacean facility—and a monster shark cottage industry was born.
Angel: The Angel of Death.
Two shows daily. Always your money’s worth!
Angel grew into a seventy-foot albino nightmare that drew crowds from across the world, earning the Tanaka-Taylor family hundreds of millions of dollars. She also managed to escape twice, birth two litters of pups, and devour no less than a dozen humans—five of them in her own lagoon.
And yet people still lined up by the tens of thousands to see her and they wept when it was announced she had died.
The public had an entirely different reaction when they learned “the sisters” had escaped.
Angel had given birth to five female offspring four years earlier, but two of the sharks were nearly twice the size of their three smaller siblings and far more vicious.
Elizabeth, or Lizzy for short, was pure albino like her mother. The voting public (swayed by various European blogs) had named the shark after Elizabeth Bathory, purportedly the worst serial killer in Slovak history. In 1610, the infamous “Countess of Blood” had been charged with the torture and deaths of hundreds, mostly young girls. Her cold savagery seemed to match the personality of the stark-white juvenile, who often took a calculated second position to her more ferocious twin, Bela.
Known to the staff as “the Dark Overlord,” Bela was the only Megalodon offspring born with pigmentation. Though her head was pure white, the rest of her dorsal surface was a dark charcoal gray, giving her a rather bizarre, sinister appearance. Named after Belle Gunness, the infamous “Black Widow” who teased and killed fourteen of her suitors back in 1908, Bela was the brawn to Lizzy’s brains—an aggressive predator that had to be separated from the pack during feeding time by trainers using bang sticks on reach poles to keep her from going after her smaller siblings—the blood in the water driving the forty-six-foot, twenty-one-ton killer into a frenzy.